Bruce Davidson ~ Los Angeles Supermarket, 1964
In the market for a Lautrec
Category: Bruce Davidson
Home is where the heart is
For two years in the 1960s, Bruce Davidson photographed one block in East Harlem. He went back day after day, standing on sidewalks, knocking on doors, asking permission to photograph a face, a child, a room, a family…
Davidson’s strobe doesn’t dispel the gloom or glamorize the ruin of the apartments, alleyways, storefronts, and rubble-strewn lots where people stopped to pose for him, but the rapport he established allows those people to surrender to the camera with their humanity intact. —Vince Aletti
Like the people who live on the block, I love and hate it and I keep going back. —Bruce Davidson
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| Bruce Davidson: East 100th Street |
Girl with kitten
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| Bruce Davidson, London 1960 |
“I’m like Zsa Zsa Gabor,’’ Bruce Davidson says. “I’m famous, but no one knows for what.’’
Photography people know very well what Davidson is famous for. In a career that’s spanned more than half a century, he’s shot Marilyn Monroe and the civil rights movement, the building of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and the Supremes having a snowball fight. His photo essays on a Brooklyn youth gang in the ’50s, East Harlem in the ’60s, the New York subway system in the ’70s, and New York’s Central Park in the ’90s are classics.
A protege of Henri Cartier-Bresson and longtime member of the legendary agency Magnum Photos, Davidson was the first photographer to win a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Along with such contemporaries as Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander, he helped transform documentary photography in the ’60s.
Davidson, 77, laughs when he recalls going to a burlesque show in Atlantic City with Arbus. Rumpled, relaxed, a little roly-poly, he’s Daddy Warbucks bald beneath a baseball cap and as amiable as Annie. He recalls Arbus saying, “You know, Bruce, you’re better when people are not looking at the camera, and I’m better when people are looking at the camera.’’
© 2010 The New York Times Company
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